What We’re Reading

New York Times reporters and editors are highlighting great stories from around the web. You can receive What We’re Reading by email, and let us know how you like it at wwr@nytimes.com.

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Yet More Lethal

From The Trace archives: In 2015, The Trace — a nonprofit site focused on firearms-related violence and news — published this useful overview of aftermarket accessories that allow owners of semiautomatic rifles to modify their weapons for so-called bump firing, which resembles the rates of automatic fire. The mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which the authorities say at least one bump-firing device was used, is bringing public attention to these accessories. This report, which includes credible sourcing, covers technical and legal issues related to the bump-fire debate. — C.J. Chivers, writer at large

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Critical Thinking

From The New York Times: Writers from across the political spectrum weighed in on the the mass shooting in Las Vegas and the debate over gun control in the United States. Conservatives urged against politicizing the moment, while liberals argued that 59 senseless deaths and hundreds of injuries demanded policy changes. — Justin Bank, senior editor, internet and audience

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CreditJohn Locher/Associated Press

Follow the Money

From The New Yorker archives: After the Orlando shooting last year, the writer Evan Osnos took a deep look at the gun industry. Osnos was back in the U.S. after years in China, and his fresh eyes found the story of “how millions of Americans discovered the urge to carry weapons.” It didn’t begin in the Old West, he said, but in the 1970s. — Andrea Kannapell, editor, What We’re Reading

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CreditGerald Herbert/Associated Press

A Surreal Rescue

From The Los Angeles Times: Two flooded Texas nursing homes. An armed Cajun Navy volunteer who said he “had to beat the crap out of” an administrator to rescue residents. A criminal investigation. Matt Pearce, who is not a health care reporter, happened into the story after Hurricane Harvey. “The more I pulled at the strings of why it all happened, the more difficult it became to outright assign blame to anyone — and then it was only at the end of the reporting process that I learned about the gun,” he wrote me in response to my fan mail. “I just kept thinking about my own grandmother, who just turned 90, and who easily could have been one of those people stuck in the middle of this.” — Sheri Fink, correspondent

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CreditAmy Lombard for The New York Times

The Phenomenon

From The New Yorker: A brilliant dispatch on why and how “Bodak Yellow,” the unlikely hit from the Instagram celeb Cardi B became the song of the summer. — Jenna Wortham, Magazine staff writer, “Still Processing” co-host

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CreditDavid Boe/Associated Press

You Say ‘Ace-ala’

From Bloomberg Politics: Because I took an Acela from New York to Washington on Sunday, I was so ready for my colleague Alex Burns’s droll account of Amtrak’s high-speed train that has become, to some, a symbol of Eastern Seaboard elitism. Alex nailed the entirely humdrum experience, describing Acela passengers arriving “agitated by splenetic tweeting and an excess of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee…” I was instantly reminded of this hilarious video, a compilation of local TV anchors tripping over the name last year during what was called the “Acela Primary.” — Trip Gabriel, correspondent

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CreditScott Weiner/MediaPunch/IPX, via Associated Press

Time Travel

From The Times archives: In 1978, Robert Palmer — who went on to become The Times’s first full-time popular music critic — reviewed Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at the Palladium in New York City. In his brief, characteristically insightful piece, he noted that the band’s sound defied the labels of punk, pop-rock, art-rock and jazz-rock while evoking the ’60s. “... Basically, Mr. Petty is an original, and his intense, snarling vocal delivery and nicely chunky guitar arrangements have an appealing fervor and immediacy.” — Jennifer Parrucci, senior taxonomist